Helping Mothers Survive Strategies Shared with Peace Corps Volunteers

July 20, 2016

Jhpiego’s Jennifer Breads explains training strategies at an event for Peace Corps volunteers — nurse practitioners, doctors and midwives who will work with local health providers.

More than 60 new Peace Corps volunteers — nurse practitioners, midwives and physicians — got a chance to see a demonstration of Jhpiego’s innovative lifesaving strategies as they prepared to leave for their 1-year service abroad.

Laura Fitzgerald (right) speaks with a new Peace Corps volunteer who is heading to Swaziland.

Laura Fitzgerald, Leah Hart — Peace Corps alumnae — and Jennifer Breads served as Jhpiego’s representatives at the July event in Washington, DC. They demonstrated aspects of our Helping Mothers Survive training strategies that are used to update the skills of health providers in managing complications of pregnancy and birth. They also brought along “mama U,” an innovative simulator used in training health workers to safely and effectively insert an intrauterine device in the postpartum period, convenient for women looking for a long-acting but reversible family planning method and healthy birth spacing.

The Peace Corps volunteers who attended the event will be working to build the capacity of local health providers in Swaziland, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda and Liberia — all places where Jhpiego is committed to preventing the needless death of women and their families.